The wall lamps cast a stabbing glare, turning the glass cylinder into a prism of shifting colors.
A sea of emerald leaves rolled in waves. Samehada opened its maw and bit down on a bundle of leaves and branches.
The sucking sound echoed inside the sealed cylinder, like a starving man who hadn't eaten in three days wolfing down noodles. With terrifying suction, that vast green ocean, thick as porridge, poured straight into its mouth.
Clack!
Before Samehada could even get its fill, the tree branch was yanked right back out of its jaws.
Konome Taketori grabbed Samehada and leapt down from the tree. Dust burst up from the neat brick floor of the underground chamber.
"What is it, what is it?" Tsubaki-hime, who had been dozing against the glass cylinder, jolted awake at the bang and scrambled to her feet.
"Sorry, something urgent came up. Keep sleeping."
Konome Taketori waved at Tsubaki-hime and charged out of the basement with Samehada on her shoulder. If not for the barrier, she would have already blasted straight outside in the blink of an eye.
"How am I supposed to sleep now?"
Tsubaki-hime's complaining voice echoed behind her, but there wasn't much anger in it.
These past few days, the two had gotten familiar. She understood Konome Taketori's temperament. If it weren't truly important, she wouldn't be this reckless.
Still, her nap plans were officially ruined.
Whum!
Strange patterns rippled across the barrier's surface and vanished. Konome Taketori took the stairs three at a time and emerged inside the research division.
A young nurse pushing a medical cart saw her burst out in a rush and immediately stopped. Others made way without being told.
Over this period, Chihaya Tōru's attitude toward Konome Taketori had changed. He never announced anything, but no one here was blind. Everyone could tell.
Quietly, they had begun treating her as the research division's second-in-command. The old rumors had evaporated into nothing.
But new rumors had taken their place.
For example, that Danzō-sama no longer concerned himself with Root's day-to-day affairs and devoted himself fully to cultivation, and that Konome Taketori would manage Root on his behalf, chosen as the future successor to the position of Root leader, and so on.
The rumors weren't true, but they weren't absurd either.
After all, she was Danzō-sama's newest disciple, the so-called second-strongest in Root. If the leader truly let her manage Root, it would be perfectly logical. For a low-level Root grunt, this was the kind of thing you'd rather believe than dismiss.
So when the "young master of Root" rushed past, everyone was extra respectful.
Seeing a straight path open up, Konome Taketori didn't hesitate. She barreled out of the research division like a runaway cart.
The violent wind of her passage whipped everyone's hair into chaos, and the sight of her tearing through the base only made the rumors feel more real.
Ryōma works fast.
Konome Taketori sprinted down the dim corridor. Along the way, the guards behaved as if they hadn't seen a thing. Restricted areas that used to be impossible to approach now felt like paper walls. The route was normally full of turns and detours, but she cut it into a straight line and reached the surface quickly.
That was the plan the two of them had discussed that day.
Danzō was shut away in a sealed chamber, adjusting to his new arm, unable to spare attention. Ryōma, meanwhile, was quietly building momentum inside Root.
These rumors might still seem small now, but once Danzō died, Root would fall naturally into their hands. Legitimacy mattered everywhere.
The barrier disengaged.
Konome Taketori shot out of the underground tunnel and into the forest outside the base.
The sky was deep blue, the sun dazzling. Golden light streamed through the bare branches, striping the ground with long shadows.
Late autumn was near, but the air wasn't hot.
After so long in darkness, the sudden brightness made Konome Taketori squint. Her body instinctively wanted to retreat back into the underground gloom.
Living in Root's base every day, eating and sleeping with no schedule, sometimes she couldn't even tell time anymore. It was worse than a vampire's routine. And the people in Root kept getting stranger. The oppressive environment was probably part of it.
Konome Taketori tilted her head, judged direction by the sun, and headed toward the Forest of Death.
After a long time scouting, she'd mapped the terrain.
The primitive forest where Root's base hid was the outer edge of Konoha's Training Ground Twenty-Seven. Head north through the trees, and you'd reach the Forest of Death where her original body was waiting.
Sizzle!
Lightning Release Chakra Mode boiled across her skin. Riding the sharp autumn wind, she exploded toward her destination.
The wind howled past her ears. The earth groaned under her steps. But none of it could drown out the surge in her chest.
It had been nearly half a year since she crossed into this world.
From a lonely, hunted bamboo-cutting girl, pursued by Kirigakure, to becoming the shared disciple of Hiruzen Sarutobi and Danzō, secretly taking Root into her hands, even developing her own path to longevity, pointing her blade at the pinnacle of the shinobi world.
Only she knew how hard that road had been. Only she knew how much she'd suffered.
Finally.
Finally.
Her eyes shone bright as stars. She couldn't put the feeling into words, so she poured it into chakra, releasing power without restraint.
Boom, boom, boom!
A lightning-wreathed figure tore through the forest like a raging dragon.
Massive trees shook and toppled. The ground was plowed into deep furrows. Birds shrieked and fled into the sky.
This wasn't traveling.
This was pure release.
She kept racing north. Minutes later, she saw a giant wire mesh fence, and deep brown branches pushing through the grid like claws.
That was the famous Forest of Death.
Konome Taketori didn't slow. She launched herself like a falling goose over the fence and continued toward the waterfall.
But after only half a kilometer, she sensed something wrong.
The autumn wind scraped her cheeks.
Her nose twitched.
A faint stench hid in the air, and after all that venting, once her mind cleared, that odor finally stabbed through the haze.
She stopped.
Carefully, she activated the Byakugan and looked ahead.
The mottled canopy and dense branches turned transparent.
In the thick grass, animal corpses lay piled everywhere, flattening the vegetation. Flies swarmed. Skin was wrinkled and warped, and in the rotting breaks, a bizarre blue-gray hue showed through.
Konome Taketori's eyelid twitched.
Just in her line of sight, there were more than a hundred bodies.
And they were large ones: boars, giant snakes, things like that. The stench was so thick it felt like someone had shoved chopsticks into her nostrils and stirred them around.
Exactly like the Senju Tree in the basement.
She reflexively shut off her sense of smell by manipulating her nerves. Even in cool late autumn, for them to rot like this, and on such a scale…
How many animals had the original body used for experiments?
Konome Taketori couldn't help marveling.
Yes. She was certain where these carcasses came from.
They were the result of her original body's experiments to perfect Reverse Eight Gates.
That final hurdle required constant extraction and refinement of life force, then injecting it into other animals to test for impurities.
Extracting life force itself aged and killed the donor. That was obvious.
And if the recipient beast contained foreign life-force impurities, its body would grow tissue that did not belong to it. Once rejection started, it died even faster.
Most of these corpses were intact. The worst damage was around the abdomen: claw marks, bite marks, organs pulled out. Clear signs that they died first, then scavengers were drawn in and tore them open.
More importantly, on many bodies, she saw tissue that absolutely did not belong to their species.
Rabbits with deer antlers. Wolves with rings of snake fangs inside their muzzles. Pythons with porcupine spines erupting along their backs. Boars with yellow, net-like patterns across their hides.
Some even showed plant traits.
There were deer whose exact species she couldn't even identify anymore, because green needle-like leaves had sprouted from their antlers and even from inside their eyes.
Those eerie plants glowed bluish-green, growing in circles around the eyeballs, some even budding half-purple, half-red stamens.
This was not a state any natural creature should ever reach.
Thinking, Konome Taketori stepped over the twisted corpses and moved deeper into the forest.
Along the way she saw countless malformed animals. The farther in she went, the stranger the bodies became, and the more complete the corpses were.
Not because they were fresher.
Because even many small animals had joined the dead, and the scavengers that would normally eat them had all died too. With nothing left to feed, the bodies remained intact.
Boom, boom, boom!
The waterfall drew closer. She could already hear the deep, thunder-like roar of water.
She went farther in.
To her surprise, once she entered the waterfall's range, the animal corpses abruptly vanished.
No.
Almost all life vanished.
Where her gaze fell, the grass was yellowed and withered. Trees were dried out as if scorched by flame, branches drooping lifelessly.
It was nothing like the green vitality outside.
It was as if two invisible boundary lines cut the Forest of Death into zones.
The outer forest remained lively. With mass die-offs in the center, many animals had been forced outward, raising the density along the perimeter.
In the middle region, there were heaps of grotesque corpses, and only small birds that were hard to catch. Not only were they unaffected, some carrion creatures were even more active and robust than before.
Crows especially.
She'd seen at least a thousand.
Every one of them fat as chickens.
But now, in the core, even plants had died.
Grass failed. Trees dried. Even hardy insects were gone, as if this were a dead domain.
She walked and observed.
The deeper she went, the more barren the ecology became, until the ground held no grass at all. Trees had decayed straight into the earth, and with time, fungus and bracket mushrooms bloomed across them.
Her Byakugan pierced the surface.
The wood was loose like sponge, riddled with holes, utterly devoid of moisture or life.
Compared to the fly-ridden carcasses outside, this felt even more dead.
So the Forest of Death really lived up to its name.
Konome Taketori mocked silently and looked toward the waterfall, now deafening.
From afar, she saw a figure identical to herself, seated cross-legged atop a massive boulder.
Purple light flowed through her like a river, and three green Gates of Life pulsed inside her, surging like a spring.
When Konome Taketori came close, she realized her original body had changed drastically.
Silver hair spilled over her shoulders to her waist, rising and falling with the breeze. It reflected the sunlight like liquid mercury, both dazzling and sharp, like metallic wire.
Her skin looked like polished jade, fine as cream. But the most striking thing wasn't beauty.
It was vitality.
"You caused this much chaos?" the original body asked, slowly opening her eyes.
Three layered seals rotated at her brow. A faint shimmer danced in her gaze. Within the rolling, heavy ash-gray dōjutsu power, her eyes seemed brighter than the blazing sun above.
"With no humans to use as test subjects, I had to use animals," Konome Taketori's Yang Release clone said, nodding. "To make sure nothing went wrong, I did more trials."
She wasn't an animal protection activist. If she'd already decided not to use humans, then using a few small animals was nothing to feel guilty about.
"How does it feel?" the clone asked.
"Better than anything I've ever felt."
The original body smiled, seated on the boulder, spreading her arms as if she wanted to embrace the entire sky. In her pale palms, two crimson eyeballs spun freely, eerie, yet possessing a strange beauty.
"The results are even more perfect than we predicted.
Using the Sharingan's extreme Yin dōjutsu power, I shaped and simulated a filtration organ for Hashirama cells. In a sense, it's another form of Yin-Yang Release.
The life force I obtain is incredibly pure. Then I inject it through the 'Gate' into the source of life, and I can feel my power rising every single day."
As she spoke, she closed her eyes in indulgence, as if savoring the intense ecstasy of life force flooding into her body.
The feeling was like starving until your vision blurred, your stomach spasming, your body already halfway into death.
Then suddenly you bite into a piece of braised pork belly, glossy with fat, and wash it down with a bowl of steaming white rice.
Forget taste.
That warmth spreading from the inside, that fullness returning to your gut, gives you hope, and an almost obscene relief.
"Life is the root of everything. The more I devour foreign life, the more I can feel my body changing at a fundamental level.
Old teeth loosen and fall out, replaced by tougher new ones. Hair grows thicker and shinier. Skin turns clearer and whiter.
Even the chakra seed inside me seems to be sprouting under the nourishment of life.
Stealing life from all things to raise chakra. With energy overflowing, the Shikotsumyaku naturally strengthens the flesh. My mental power and Byakugan both benefit too, evolving toward a higher dimension…"
"Wait," the Yang Release clone cut in sharply, catching the key point. "Byakugan evolution?"
If the Byakugan evolved again, that meant the Tenseigan.
That required fusing hundreds of Hyūga Byakugan, or a Byakugan paired with an Ōtsutsuki body.
Did devouring life somehow awaken Ōtsutsuki blood?
Two minds, one heart. The original body saw exactly what the clone was thinking and shook her head.
"Reverse Eight Gates is only just successful. My life-force accumulation still isn't abundant.
My Sage Body is at most in a budding stage. I could pass myself off as Uzumaki or Senju if I had to, but returning to the Ōtsutsuki level is still far beyond me.
As for Byakugan evolution…"
She paused, her ash-gray dōjutsu power surging even heavier in her eyes.
"Have you ever thought about something important?"
Then, softly, she asked:
"Why are our Byakugan gray?"
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